Fiber-optic communication systems continue to revolutionize the communications industry, becoming evermore ubiquitous. Recent developments in fiber-optic links have dramatically increased data throughput rates in such applications as, e.g., local area networks (LANs) and storage area networks (SANs). For instance, the 10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable (SFP) Multi Source Agreement (MSA) Group has a goal of creating a specification for a module, cage hardware, and integrated circuit (IC) interfaces for a 10 Gb hot pluggable module that converts serial electrical signals to external, serial optical or electrical signals. The technology is intended to have notable flexibility, including the capacity to support OC 192.STM64, 10 G Fiber Channel G.702, and 10 G Ethernet using, e.g., the same module.
Various fiber-optic communication systems have been designed for conveying information from one location to another location. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,845,024, issued on Dec. 1, 1998, relates to an optical fiber with lens and method of manufacturing the same; U.S. Pat. No. 6,527,456, issued on Mar. 4, 2003, relates to a cluster integration approach to optical transceiver arrays and fiber bundles for fiber-optic communication; U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,171, issued on Sep. 14, 2004, relates to a receiver optical sub-assembly; U.S. Pat. No. 6,851,870, issued Feb. 8, 2005, relates to a method for measuring and assembling a transceiver optical sub-assembly; U.S. Pat. No. 6,889,010, issued on May 3, 2005, relates to a star topology network with fiber interconnect on chip; U.S. Pat. No. 7,011,455, issued on Mar. 14, 2006, relates to an optoelectronic TO-package and method for laser; and U.S. Pat. No. 7,306,377, issued on Dec. 11, 2007, relates to an integrated optical sub-assembly having an epoxy chip package.
Existing fiber-optic transmitters, receivers, and transceivers are quite large, creating space and weight issues for high density applications in the high reliability sector. Retrofitting older copper infrastructures with fiber-optics for high density applications is currently difficult, or sometimes impossible to achieve with existing fiber-optic transmitters, receivers, or transceivers.